Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (99 page)

Perhaps the most conspicuous evidence of Bismarck’s failure is simply the spectacular growth of the Centre Party, the party of the Prussian – and many German – Catholics. Although Bismarck did succeed in isolating the Centre Party within the Prussian parliament – at least for a time – he could do nothing to prevent it from increasing its share of German votes in the national elections. Whereas only 23 per cent of Prussian Catholics had voted Centre in 1871, 45 per cent did so in 1874. Thanks in large part to the ravages of Bismarck’s
Kulturkampf
, the Centre Party ‘peaked early’, efficiently colonizing its social milieu, mobilizing Catholics who had hitherto been politically inactive, expanding the frontiers of partisan politics.
³¹
The other parties would gradually follow suit by mobilizing their own new voters from the non-Catholic parts of the population, but it was not until 1912 that the Centre Party’s great leap forward was evened out by improvements in the performance of other parties. Even then, the Centre remained the strongest Reichstag party after the Social Democrats. Since most liberals and conservatives were still wary of dealing with the socialists, this made the Centre the most powerful player on the parliamentary scene – hardly the outcome Bismarck had in mind when he opened hostilities in 1871.

Prussia was no stranger to confessional tensions, but the scope and brutality of Bismarck’s anti-Catholic campaign was unprecedented in the history of the state. The controversy over mixed marriages in the later 1830s had been dramatic, partly because of the emotive character of the issue, but it was essentially an institutional conflict between church and state, in which the objective was to stake out the boundaries of authority within an administrative grey zone. By contrast, the
Kulturkampf
was a ‘culture war’, a struggle in which it seemed that the very identity of the new nation was at stake. That the conflict between state and church should have expanded in this way to embrace the totality of public life was a consequence of the unstable interaction between Prussia’s confessional tensions, Bismarck’s ruthlessness and the challenges posed by German nationhood. In seeking to drive the Catholic church out of politics, Bismarck had used Prussian instruments to achieve German objectives. ‘You may perhaps prove that I erred,’ he
told the Reichstag in a speech of 1881, ‘but never that I lost sight for one moment of the national goal.’
³²
Few political conflicts illustrate more clearly than the
Kulturkampf
the volatilizing effect of German unification on Prussian politics.

‘During the proceedings in this House,’ a Polish deputy told the Reichstag of the North German Confederation in February 1870,

we find ourselves in a curious position when words ring in our ears about the German past, about German mores and customs, about the welfare of the German people. Not that we begrudge the German people their welfare or want to impede their future. But what for you may be a common bond – this past, these mores and customs, this future – is for us more an element of separation
vis-à-vis
yourselves.
³³

The Poles of the Prussian east responded to the political unification of the German states with a sense of foreboding. To be a Polish subject of the Prussian Crown might be a difficult predicament, but to be a Polish German was a contradiction in terms. Subjecthood and nationality were complementary concepts; the Poles might learn to live – at least outwardly – in peace with the Prussian state. They might even come to prize its virtues. But how could they subsist – as Poles – within a German nation? The ascendancy of the nation as a focal point for identity and a rationale for political action was bound to have far-reaching consequences for the Poles of the Prussian lands.

Of the 18.5 million inhabitants of Prussia in 1861, 2.25 million were Poles, concentrated mainly in the provinces of Posen and West Prussia (55 and 32 per cent Polish respectively) and the south-eastern districts of Silesia. Prussian policy regarding this minority, the largest in the Hohenzollern lands, had always been ambivalent, oscillating between tolerance and repression. After 1815, the government accepted the existence of a distinctive Polish nationality and fatherland under the Hohenzollern sceptre, though only on the condition, of course, that the Poles remained loyal Prussian subjects. When the Polish uprising of 1830
raised concerns about the dangers posed by Polish nationalism, the administration switched to cultural repression centred on the imposition of German as the language of education and public communication, but this policy was abandoned in 1840 after the accession of Frederick William IV. The wind changed again in 1846 after an abortive Polish insurrection in the Grand Duchy of Posen. The group behind the uprising was the Posen-city-based ‘Union of the Working Classes’, whose objective was to break the power of both the Prussian administration
and
the Polish landed nobility. Before the insurrection could get going, however, its prospective leaders were betrayed by anxious Polish noblemen to the Prussian police. A crackdown followed, in the course of which 254 Poles were tried in Berlin for involvement in the conspiracy, provincial towns were combed by police units, and suspect press organs gagged or closed down.

This zig-zag course was essentially pragmatic and reactive. The goal was to ensure the political stability of the Polish areas. The cultivation of a distinctively Polish cultural milieu was acceptable, as long as this did not feed into nationalist or secessionist aspirations. However, the situation changed somewhat after the revolutions of 1848. These seemed at first to bring good news for the Poles. Prussian liberal opinion was overwhelmingly pro-Polish. In March 1848, the imprisoned radicals of the 1846 uprising were liberated and paraded through the streets of Berlin to wild cheering. The new ‘March’ ministry favoured the restoration of Poland as a buffer against potential Russian aggression, and on 2 April, the reconvened Prussian United Diet also passed a motion in favour of Polish restoration. Not for the first, or the last, time, it seemed that the hour of Polish liberty was at hand. Ludwik Mieroslawski, a military strategist and one of the leaders of the 1846 uprising, hurried to Posen to assemble a Polish army.
³⁴
In the mainly Polish areas of the duchy, the authority of the Prussian administration faded away as the local nobility took matters into their own hands, recruiting fighters and raising funds for Mieroslawski. It was an alarming demonstration of the fragility of Prussian governance on the eastern margins of the kingdom.

At the same time, however, the revolution triggered a process of ethnic polarization in the Grand Duchy of Posen. When the Polish National Committee in Posen refused to admit German members, the latter formed their own German committee, which soon fell under the influence of nationalists. Many Germans in predominantly Polish areas fled
to solidly German districts where the Prussian local administration was still functioning. On 9 April, activists in Bromberg founded the Netze District Central Citizens’ Committee for the Promotion of Prussian and German Interests in the Grand Duchy of Posen – the juxtaposition of ‘Prussian’ and ‘German’ was telling, to say the least.
³⁵
In May, after various efforts at compromise had collapsed, the Prussian army entered the duchy and crushed Mieroslawski’s army in a series of bloody military engagements. Prussian officials returned to their posts. The revolutionary National Assembly in Berlin continued to argue for a policy of Polish national equality under Prussian rule, but it was dissolved in the
coup d’état
of November 1848.

The new Prussian constitution of 1848–50 contained no reference to the idea of Polish minority rights and no indication that Posen or any other Polish district enjoyed special status. To senior administrators, the idea that the Prussian Crown might secure Polish loyalties by a policy of leniency now seemed passé. The Poles, it was argued, were beyond such appeals: ‘they cannot be won over by any concessions,’ an interior ministry report observed in November 1849.
³⁶
Since the conciliation of the Polish national movement in Posen was an impossibility, the Prussian government was left with no option but to ‘confine it energetically to the subordinate position it deserves’.
³⁷
The term ‘Germanization’ (
Germanisierung
) began to appear with increasing frequency in official documents.

Yet the Prussian government showed little interest in adopting the idea of ‘Germanization’ as the basis for concrete policy measures. Calls from Posnanian Germans for government assistance to the German minority went unanswered – Minister-President Otto von Manteuffel took the view that if the German element was unable to subsist without state intervention, then it had no future. The authorities kept a close watch on nationalist activity, but the Poles continued to enjoy the civil liberties vouchsafed under the Prussian constitution, including the right to mount election campaigns on behalf of Polish deputies to the Landtag. Moreover, the Prussian judiciary in Posen was scrupulous in defending the status of Polish as the language of internal administration and elementary schooling.
³⁸

In the 1860s there were periodic calls for government Germanization measures, but the government remained reluctant to act, partly because it believed that market forces would ultimately favour German settlement
and partly – in the years 1866–9 – because Bismarck was keen to appease the Polish clergy in order not to alienate the German Catholics of the southern states and jeopardize unification. So determined was Bismarck to maintain good relations with the Polish hierarchy during these years that he sacked the provincial president, Carl von Horn, in 1869 after a dispute between the latter and Archbishop Ledóchowski of Posen-Gnesen.
³⁹

The accomplishment of German political unification brought a paradigm shift in the government’s handling of the Polish question. The Prussian authorities in the east were deeply alarmed during the summer of 1870 by the wave of undisguised partisanship for France. Polish recruits were urged to desert their Prussian regiments (a call that virtually none of them followed) and there were angry demonstrations at the news of Prussian-German victories. The situation in Posen appeared so volatile during the hostilities with France that reserve troop contingents were quartered on the province to keep order.
⁴⁰
This rebellious behaviour triggered outbursts of vengeful fury from Bismarck. ‘From the Russian border to the Adriatic Sea,’ he told a Prussian cabinet meeting in the autumn of 1871, ‘we are confronted with the combined propaganda of Slavs, ultramontanes and reactionaries, and it is necessary openly to defend our national interests and our language against such hostile activities.’
⁴¹
Hyperbolic to the point of paranoia, this imagined scenario of Slavic-Roman encirclement revealed the depth of Bismarck’s anxieties for the new Prussian-German nation-state. Here again was that paradoxical sense of fragility and beleagueredness that had dogged the Prussian state at every phase of its aggrandizement.

Bismarck’s first target was the Polish clergy whose interests he had earlier so assiduously defended. The chief objective of the Schools Inspection Act of 11 March 1872 was to replace the ecclesiastical dignitaries who had traditionally overseen the inspection of the 2,480 Catholic schools in the province with professional full-time inspectors in the pay of the state. Poland thus became the launching pad for Prussia’s
Kulturkampf
against the Catholic church, and the old Prussian policy of pragmatic collaboration with the hierarchy was cast aside. The effect, predictably enough, was to reinforce the clergy’s leadership in the Polish national struggle. In many areas, the efforts of the Prussian authorities to enforce
Kulturkampf
legislation against local Polish clergy resulted in direct action. Communities gathered to defend their priests physically
against arrest. The ‘state priests’ sent to replace imprisoned or deported clergymen were shunned or even beaten by their congregations. Father Moerke, a German priest assigned by the authorities to the parish of Powidz in 1877, found his church silent and empty – his parishioners preferred to attend the masses of a Polish priest in a nearby village. Even Moerke’s death in 1882 did not dispel the stigma – the villagers dug up his coffin and plunged it into a lake.
⁴²

In 1872–3 a volley of royal instructions issued from Berlin restricting the use of languages other than German in the schools of the eastern provinces. Among the collateral victims of this policy were the Prussian Lithuanians, who had never given any cause for offence, and the Polish-speaking East-Prussian Masurians, who were neither Catholics nor enthusiasts of Polish restoration.
⁴³
A statute of 1876 established German as the sole language of official business for all Prussian government agencies and political bodies; other vernaculars could still be used in a range of parochial institutions, but this was to be phased out over a maximum of twenty years. Across the Polish areas, the lower clergy played a crucial role in coordinating protests against the new language policy. Parish priests assisted in the posting and collection of petitions – some bearing as many as 300,000 signatures – denouncing the Prussian authorities.
⁴⁴

From this point onwards, Germanization would remain the principle underpinning the rhetoric and much of the action of successive Prussian administrations in the Polish areas. In one of the most notorious manifestations of the new hard-line approach, the Prussian government expelled 32,000 non-naturalized Poles and Jews from Berlin and the eastern provinces in 1885, though they had done nothing to breach German or Prussian law. In 1886, alarmed by the increasing emigration of Germans from the depressed agrarian east to the rapidly industrializing western regions, the conservative-national liberal majority in the Prussian Landtag approved the foundation of a Royal Prussian Colonization Commission. With its headquarters in Posen City and a capital of 100 million marks, the commission’s purpose was to purchase failing Polish estates, subdivide them and hand them out to incoming German farmers. Bismarck – along with many of the conservatives – had initially been opposed to subdivision because he deemed it inimical to the interests of the Junker class, but the colonization programme could succeed only with the backing of the National Liberals, who insisted on parcellation.